Excellent till-display truncation in Sainsbury's; "GOODBYE HOPE"
(...to see you again soon, or somesuch drivel.)

Today marks the fortieth anniversary of
Yuri Gagarin's
jaunt into orbit. But did Vladimir Ilyushin
get there first, crash-landing in communist China a few days before,
and having his mission covered up by an embarrassed Russian government?
(Er, no, probably not.)

11.04.01

I always feel as if I'm glimpsing some lazily-satirical alternate-reality
mockumentary, whenever I see George
W. Bush on a television screen, that any newspaper article with
his photograph must likely be Onion-style fakery. This is not comedic exaggeration.

The team's ultimate dream is to "build something they can fly
inside a building without bumping into walls". Or windows, presumably.

Dawn-of-universe theories all seem delightfully barmy when you barely
understand the science of them; all the more so when they
come from people called "Neil Turok". He and his team theorise that
matter was created in our universe when
we
got hit by another universe. Superb.

The texts of Charles Fort's Book
of the Damned and
New
Lands available online - never a patch on bundles of paper, but
nice to have around as a reference.

It still amazes me how everything in this world can be more or less divided into
products of evolution, products of human intervention and
rocks. The millions of adaptive ancestors to any given tree
or goat or pigeon, the intentional design, assembly and placement of
any particular brick or postbox or aspirin.

Stop to consider the
existential history of any random object your eye falls upon - either
the millennia of tooth-and-nail genetic warfare in a world alongside
your own DNA, or the individual human beings responsible for designing
every aspect of a thing, sketching the logo, assembling it, nailing it to a wall,
deciding what colour to paint it, painting it, and whatever else. It's
too easy to take our environment for granted.

09.04.01

Why are rubber stamps so damnably expensive? I saw a magnificent one today
with a line-drawing of a dour-faced Victorian gentleman above the
legend "BORING", but the shopkeeper was asking seven or eight
pounds for it. Interrogating the
Internet, I only get a
rubber-stamp manufacturer whining about his own ineptitude, of
the hundreds of ruined stamps he had to throw away. What gives? Is there
some huge and shadowy rubber-stamp cartel in operation?

For the benefit of evil search-engine terrorists and - mainly - my hazy
future self looking for particular things I might have said, there's now
an Atomz search box in
the navigation bar. And a list of whatever game-related distractions my
brain's currently partial to, for what it's worth.